The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (85 page)

A Chocolate Life

Hollywood retirement: champagne, caviar, fresh flowers delivered every day, and all the chocolate you can eat.

No matter how old you are, you can always learn more about film
.

D
irector Akira Kurosawa, at age eighty-two: “I’m just beginning to understand what cinema can do.”

Did I tell you to get the hell out of L.A.?

R
aymond Chandler: “No doubt I have learned a lot from Hollywood. Please do not think I completely despise it, because I don’t … but the overall picture, as the boys say, is of a degraded community whose idealism even is largely fake. The pretentiousness, the bogus enthusiasm, the incessant squabbling over money, the all-pervasive agent, the strutting of the big shots (and their usually utter incompetence to achieve anything they start out to do), the constant fear of losing all this fairy gold and being the nothing they have really never ceased to be, the snide tricks, the whole damn mess is out of this world … it is like one of these South American palace revolutions conducted by officers in comic opera uniforms—only when the thing is over the ragged dead men lie in rows against the wall, and you suddenly know that this is not funny, this is the Roman circus, and damn near the end of civilization.”

If you reach a certain point, quit screenwriting
.

I
mean it. I bartended for a while.

Screenwriter Jeffrey Boam: “I have a schedule, I have a secretary and a producing partner and a development person, and I feel like I’m no longer living the quiet, contemplative life of a writer. I’m not getting that benefit anymore, and I’ve gotten to the point where I’m losing my patience with directors and producers. I feel ‘Why do I have to please these people? Why do I have to knock myself out to please them? Come back to them with idea after idea after idea. They’re all good, but they reject them so often. I’m just sick of it.”

Time to go bartend, Jeffrey.

You can get drunk and dance in your bare feet
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner: “Anybody who can sell anything to the movies for more than
50,000 has a right to get drunk and dance in his bare feet.”

Peter Bart doesn’t have any balls. Or … Take notes for your Hollywood tell-all. Or … Sidney Korshak was a sleazeball
.

V
ariety
editor Peter Bart, in his book
Shoot Out
: “One night I wandered home, dead tired, and found myself leafing through the journal I had been keeping—notes that I would someday turn into my ‘definitive’ book about life at the studio. I was riveted as I relived these day-to-day experiences—encounters with Mafioso and managers, with the Roman Polanskis and the Sidney Korshaks. I’d even noted down one conversation with Korshak, the ever-somber attorney who had started out serving Al Capone and ended up mentoring stars and studio chiefs. ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘do you know what’s the best insurance policy—one that guarantees continuous breathing?’ I thought this an odd question, but I asked for his answer. ‘It’s silence,’ he intoned. He said it as though he had just imparted great wisdom, and in a sense he had. This was, after all, advice emanating from someone who was arguably the industry’s most talented ‘fixer.’ I decided it was advice worth taking. I would stay at Paramount, but I would shred my notes.”

That’s crap. Moustache Pete Omertà stuff. Write everything down and keep your notes, and if you feel like it, write the book that tells all. I’ve written two of those already.

If they screw you over, write about it
.

I
t’s okay to bite the hand that feeds you.

Ben Hecht, the king of all screenwriters, wrote the scripts for three films that satirized Hollywood:
Actors and Sin
, in which an old actor kills his actress daughter so she will not wind up being a nobody like him;
I Hate Actors
, in which a celebrated and successful script is written by a nine-year-old child;
The Scoundrel
, in which a producer says, “Don’t use that line; it’s twenty-five years old.” (The line is “I love you.”)

I wrote a script called
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
, which made fun of most of the players in town. In my first draft, I used real names, not made-up ones. I will sell that draft on eBay someday.

(Just kidding, I
think
.)

You’re a writer, not the owner of a writing factory
.

B
en Hecht hired writers to “block out and draft” scripts, which he then revised and called his own. Ernest Tidyman (
The French Connection
) did the same thing after he won the Oscar. While Ron Bass (
Rain Main
) denies that he runs a writing factory, he does hire assistants and researchers, who accompany him to studio meetings.

The trouble with doing this, of course, is that word spreads quickly, and that studios will think twice about hiring you if they think
you’re
doing what
they’re
doing: grinding out sausages.

Nobody ever accused William Goldman of running a writing factory, but he does write
quickly
. When he wrote three scripts in one year and none of them was produced, word spread that he was grinding out sausages. His phone didn’t ring for years.

Don’t die wearing a diamond ring
.

F
amed producer Mike Todd’s remains were stolen from a Chicago cemetery so the thieves could get the big diamond ring he was famous for wearing.

Anthony Pellicano will unearth you, too
.

T
he infamous Hollywood private eye’s first claim to fame was finding Mike Todd’s remains. Alas, when the Pelican found the body, the diamond ring was gone.

If you’re asked for casting advice, take great care
.

M
y first draft of
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn
called for Anthony Pellicano to play an infamous Hollywood gumshoe named Anthony Pellicano.

I called Anthony and sent him the script and he happily agreed to play himself in the film.

When I cast Sly Stallone in the lead part, Sly had only one demand: that Anthony Pellicano not be in the film.

I don’t know why he made that demand and I was smart enough not to want to know. I didn’t ask him.

I called Anthony and told him I had to write him out of the film or I’d lose Sly.

Anthony called Sly a bunch of names but said he understood that Sly’s presence in the film gave us our financing for it.

I changed the Anthony Pellicano character’s name in the script to the fictitious Sam Rizzo.

My agent called me a couple of weeks later and said he had a friend who had read the script and was desperate to play the Sam Rizzo part. It was Harvey Weinstein, then the head of Miramax and one of the most powerful people in town.

I cast Harvey and called Anthony and told him that Harvey Weinstein would be playing the part.

Anthony said: “
Harvey Weinstein?
Harvey Weinstein is going to
play me
? He’s a fuckin’ wuss. He can’t play
me
!”

I said, “No, he’s going to play Sam Rizzo.”

Anthony said, “There is no fuckin’ Sam Rizzo! Sam Rizzo is
me
!”

Anthony said: “I oughta get my baseball bat and go visit the set.”

But Anthony laughed. He was making a little joke.

The joke was funny, but
…

A
nthony invited himself over to my house in Malibu.

“I’ve got a lot of stories you’d be interested in hearing,” he said.

Something told me I wasn’t interested in hearing Anthony’s stories.

I never invited him over to my house.

That may have been the smartest move I’ve ever made in Hollywood.

Raymond Chandler was just jealous of writers who made more money than he did
.

A
fter I sold a four-page outline for
4 million, I tried not to think about what Raymond Chandler had said about screenwriting in Hollywood: “The big money still goes to the wrong people.”

P
ERK OF
S
UCCESS:
OLFACTORY PLEASURES

You will know the smell of freshly baked croissants at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills
.

You can bury your friends
.

M
axwell Bodenheim, Ben Hecht’s poet friend, wrote Ben and begged him for some money.

Ben wrote him a letter, saying that he was enclosing two hundred dollars. But he “forgot” to enclose the money.

When Maxwell Bodenheim died broke, Ben said he would pay for his funeral, so that Max wouldn’t be buried in a potter’s field. Then he put fifty dollars into a fund for his friend’s funeral.

T
AKE IT FROM ZSA ZSA

If you make it and get divorced, share custody but keep the help.

“There is nothing harder to find than good servants. I remember when I was sitting in the Plaza Hotel in New York with Porfirio Rubirosa, and George Sanders called from California to say that finally he’d allow me to divorce him, but he also said that Albert, who’d served us for years, was going with him. I started to cry bitterly. Rubirosa said, ‘You wanted to divorce him and now that he says “yes,” you start to cry.’ And I said, ‘Don’t be silly! I’m not crying for
him,
I’m crying for the butler.’ ”

You don’t have to be a victim
.

O
scar-winning screenwriter William Goldman: “I’ve never seen a rough cut of a picture I’ve written. And I rarely get invited to sneaks.
Marathon Man
is a good example, because there were two sneaks, in California. And I live in New York, so it’s expensive to bring me out. Except I was in California at the time. Wouldn’t have cost a whole lot to have [had] me along.”

I’ve seen the rough cut of almost all of the fifteen films I’ve written.

I have often been sent by FedEx the tapes of the dailies as they are printed.

I attend all of the research screenings of my films.